Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory: Bookmarked by Sven Birkerts

Author:Sven Birkerts [Sven Birkerts]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Metaphor

we won’t get far examining Nabokov’s prose style without paying attention to his use of metaphor. Metaphor is the great variable, working like yeast inside the sentence, the mysterious agency of transformation and sometimes a whirling sort of liftoff. Metaphor is favored by poets because, properly used, it can bring a sudden amplitude into the close quarters of a stanza. Maybe this is what Joseph Brodsky meant when he quipped: “Prose is infantry, poetry is air force.” Though he is mainly writing prose, Nabokov uses the transforming powers of metaphor for his own purposes. In one instance, he recalls being a young boy traveling on one of those old grand deluxe trains. As he tells it:

One night, during a trip abroad, in the fall of 1903, I recall kneeling on my (flattish) pillow at the window of a sleeping car (probably on the long-extinct Mediterranean Train de Luxe, the one whose six cars had the lower part of their body painted in umbers and the panels in cream) and seeing with an inexplicable pang, a handful of fabulous lights that beckoned to me from a distant hillside, and then slipped into a pocket of black velvet: diamonds that I later gave away to my characters to alleviate the burden of my wealth.

Almost everything here depends on metaphor. The first half of the sentence is elaborate in its syntax, but it is literal, without device. Figurative speech takes over only when he remembers seeing a “handful” of lights, a usage so common that we take it in without even noticing. Next, also familiar, are the lights that “beckoned.” But then the real transformations begin. The already humanized lights are said to have “slipped into a pocket of black velvet.” What Nabokov means, I think, is that the train has entered a tunnel, though the figurative “pocket” is by definition a cul de sac. Black velvet carries a suggestion of a jewelry pouch, which eases the way of the next transformation: the lights have now been concretized as diamonds, and the diamonds, having for just a moment materialized, right away dematerialize into conceptual entities to be given away to imagined characters—to “alleviate the burden” of Nabokov’s wealth. What he means by “wealth” here is not clear, but the action is a kind of wish, for of course the transfer of anything to created characters does not really alleviate anything.

Here’s another set of sentences:

At a collapsible table, my mother and I played a card game called durachki. Although it was broad daylight, our cards, a glass and, on a different plane, the locks of a suitcase were reflected in the window. Th ough forest and field and in sudden ravines, and among scuttling cottages, those discarnate gamblers kept steadily playing on for sparkling stakes.

Nabokov uses a different sort of metaphor here, making use of one of his favorite strategies, which is to present an action indirectly, via some refraction or distortion. He is once again remembering riding on a train, and, as always, he invites us to carefully attend the details.

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